Fighting the Illness

I've been sick the last two days, to the extent of not having the energy to move much less get work done. I slept most of the day yesterday and haven't managed to do more than remain in a upright position. I'm hoping that by tomorrow I will be feeling much better, and can once again get some good progress underway.

Weekends, Heh

Weekends are not good times for me, progress -wise apparently. I've made some progress today, but its not what I would have liked, and progress is being delayed by events with friends--but that is certainly not something I would complain about.  I've made some progress, so let's be happy the bar is moving at all.

Ugh and Ooh!

Yesterday was a bad day for me on a personal level and I'm not entirely sure it's showing any signs of improving any time soon. For the purposes of this blog I'm not going to go too deeply into detail about my personal life--really, this is supposed to be about the writing--but sometimes those details are necessary because they impact the writing. Suffice it to say I added very little to the manuscript or the first draft yesterday. These days happen, but hopefully they are few and far between, otherwise writing a tome as big as Shadow Lands is going to be a bit on the difficult side. I won't bother with a word count meter right now, because it's made such minimal progress--I hope to make up for that over the course of the day.

But on a good note, I am excited about the upcoming release of Kristen Britain's Blackveil, book 4 in her Green Rider series. It is a wonderful series of epic fantasy, and if you haven't read them yet, go out and get Green Rider, First Rider's Call and The High King's Tomb, the first three books in the series in preparation for Blackveil.

I. DID. IT.

Dead. Have class tomorrow morning. Won't be pleasant. Despite alcohol, fun, dinner, and trips places that don't need to be talked about, I hit the 20k mark--10k in 5 days. Now to hit 30k in the next five days. If you don't mind, I'm passing out now.

Today

So sue me. Didn't get much work done today--a fact that irritates me, to be honest. It's my fault along with circumstances. My fault: I have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which immediately means less time to work on the book. Add to that the fact that my brother had surgery today, and that's even less time to work on the book. That doesn't mean I got NOTHING done; I actually managed to put about 900 words to paper today, but it's a far cry from my usual progress. But that's not to be helped. Tomorrow is a day with no other obligations, which means work can progress as normal. Come hell or high water I WILL be breaking the 20k mark tomorrow!

Ps: On the plus side, the bar did go up 1 whole percent! :-)

Tonight

So I'm done with adding new words to Shadow Lands, at least completely new words. For the night. The current word count is at a respectable number, as you'll see below:

I believe, with those numbers, that I can reach the 20k mark tomorrow, thus matching my earlier progress of 10k words in 4 days.

I'm not done for the night, however. At least not yet. I'm going to do some more work on transcribing the written work to the computer (aka the first draft), hoping to catch up a bit with the point I'm at in the rough draft. The work goes on!

The Pesky "-ly" Adverbs

As a writer I'm always seeking ways to improve my craft, to better my work. I recently came across an article about adverbs being signs of weak writing. At first I was like, really? Is that truthfully what it does? (ha, notice my use of the adverb there). And then I went back and used the EDIT-FIND option in my word processor. In the 40 pages that I've gotten typed up (with a lot more written) I found a lot of instances of the "-ly" adverbs. I took the advice of the article's writer, attempting to rewrite the sentences. I found that sometimes (more often than not) it did indeed make my writing better, while other times it created something unnecessary, a sense of awkwardness in the flow of the writing. Here's the example I have for one of those times:

“We’re a lot alike, I think,” Stane commented conversationally.

This was the original sentence. Short, sweet, descriptive enough. Here is the way the article would have suggested it be done:

“We’re a lot alike, I think,” Stane commented in a conversational manner.

It just seems stilted to me, breaking up the flow of the writing.

There were times when I like the change better than the original. Here is one of those examples:

“Was there a reason you wanted to see us, or did you just wanna stare?” Puck demanded, arms crossed over his broad chest, foot tapping the creaking floorboards impatiently. 

This was the original  sentence, and here is the rewritten one:

“Was there a reason you wanted to see us, or did you just wanna stare?” Puck demanded, arms crossed over his broad chest, foot tapping the creaking floorboards with undisguised impatience.

A bit more descriptive, a bit more prose-like. There are times, I feel, that the "-ly" adverbs are a cop-out, a way of  avoiding description when I might not know what else to say. Overall, replacing these adverbs does make for stronger writing, but sometimes the adverbs ARE necessary in strong writing. Say something as simply as possible, is what I've heard from published authors and editors.

Oh, here's a quick progress update:

There will be another progress update later tonight, I'm sure.

The Four Day Challenge

I seem to be in competition with myself. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing actually. When I compete with myself I find that I do better--make much better progress than I normally do. Not so sure I'm going to live up to my own standards here, honestly. In four days I managed to reach 10k words, and that was on Friday. Technically tomorrow is the next fourth day, and I have not yet reached 20k. I'm about 5k behind. Which means I need to get 5k written tomorrow. A daunting task. Well, I could say Sunday was my off day and count WEDNESDAY as my fourth day, meaning I have to get 2,500 words in 1 day. Much more doable. So Thats what we shall do.

I don't necessarily feel bad when I don't get a certain number of words done on the manuscript, because even when my word progression isn't a high number I'm still working, be it brainstorming, transcribing (and thus adding more words; the word count I'm listing only shows the rough draft version of Shadow Lands; the transcription (first draft, see last post) is just under 1000k ahead of where I am at that same point in the rough draft (confusing, I know; you don't have to understand). I still like to meet my own challenges. I think of it like trying to match your own high score in a game or something. Below you will find a word count that shows where I'm at so far.  Might be more later on; I'm at a section (chapter) that I'm excited about. However, am exhausted (bad sleeping patterns combined with class--yes, I do have a life) and am starting to develop a headache (possibly from the incredible amount of writing I've been doing). They might go up, they might not.

In the near future I'm going to begin character introductions on here, so you can get to know the characters you'll hopefully be following in Shadow Lands when you hold the book in your hands. But for now, a bit of rest.


9.53%

My Writing Process

So today, before my normal progress update tonight, I'm going to write a little bit about my writing process for this book, which I am currently calling Shadow Lands. The writing process for me is going in like 3 stages to read more, click below.

Okay Then

Okay then, it's time to make myself serious about keeping a blog. I think it will help my writing process a lot. Having a blog sort of feels like I have someone to be accountable to. I'm still not sure what exactly the content and context of this blog will be. There will probably be posts about the writing process, about what I'm writing, about my writing progress, all of these things. And then there will be tidbits of personal things worked in--for a writer, how can you possibly separate the two? The one has such a profound impact on the other.

I promise the next post will be longer. For now suffice it to say I'm working on a WIP which has a tentative title of Shadow Lands, but I'm not sure that will stick this early in the process. I'm only about 13k words into what's likely to be a 145-160k word manuscript. This is a big undertaking. But I love the characters, and I love the path they are taking me down. I know the beginning (because I've written it) and I have an idea of the ending, but the middle...that's uncharted territory. This is going to be a lot of fun! I'll be posting the occasional progress meter below so I can keep an eye on what I'm doing and HOW I'm doing.